


Good Help

by smilebackwards



Category: Primeval
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Lester POV, Lester's Family, M/M, Nanny Connor, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 12:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>DO NOT<br/>Sleep with: Captain Becker</p><p>(Or, the AU in which Connor is the nanny for Lester's kids, but ends up at the ARC anyway.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Help

When the evacuation alarms sound, Lester means to rescue a folder of classified documents from whatever disaster Cutter and his team of miscreants have created for the day. Instead, he somehow ends up with the framed photograph he added to his desk last week. In it, Sam and Anna are hanging off Connor's back, chins resting on his shoulders as they all beam out at the camera.

"Lovely family, guv," Danny says, taking the picture frame from Lester's slack hand while Lester stares despairingly at the plume of smoke circling up from what looks to be the vicinity of Cutter's lab. "Bit of an age gap between your lads though, eh?" Danny adds, grinning. "Shotgun wedding, was it?"

"Samuel and Anna are two years apart," Lester says with some asperity. "And I'll thank you not to insult my daughter's appearance."

Danny holds up his empty hand, open-palmed. There's a streak of ash across his cheek. "I didn't mean any offense to the little girl," he says. "I was talking about your two boys."

 _Two boys?_ Lester thinks, staring at Danny and wondering if he's having some kind of diplopic reaction from smoke inhalation or prehistoric spores and if he should call over a medic. Even moderately good help like Danny is hard to find in their line of work. 

Abby pulls the picture away from Danny and coos at it like it's a destructive, carnivorous baby dinosaur that she's fully prepared to take in and rehabilitate. "They're adorable, Lester," she says. "And I don't see why you're cross with Danny. Your youngest boy can't be out of year six and your oldest looks about ready to head off to uni."

"Dear Lord, you're talking about Connor," Lester finally realizes, appalled. "He's not my son, he's the nanny. And he's twenty three. He'd be through with university entirely if his utterly useless advisor would take the time to mark his dissertation."

"You employ a nanny?" Danny asks, eyebrows raised.

Lester gives him the most supercilious look in his repertoire. "Daniel," he says, "Last week there was an incursion of Gastornis. The week before, it was Megatherium. Today, there were no anomalies, no creature attacks, and yet the building is still _on fire._ If you think I make it home by seven o'clock on any given night, you are sadly mistaken." 

Danny looks suitably chastened, but Abby looks like she might hug him, so Lester snatches back the picture and quickly walks away to go berate Cutter who is inhaling pure oxygen on the tail of an ambulance and can only give him red-eyed glares and hack at him.

\--

Repairs are underway in Cutter's lab, and the general structural integrity of the rest of the ARC managed to remain intact, but the acrid smell of smoke and singed insulation still hangs in the air days later. Lester would fire Cutter if there were anyone else in the country willing to do the man's job. 

He's filling out TCC forms for the construction costs when his phone rings. "Sir," Becker says when Lester answers, "There's someone at the outer security gate for you. Says he has an urgent message." 

Something is off about Becker's voice, but Lester has neither the time nor the inclination to make a study of the vocal modulations of Captain Becker. "Well, who is it?" he snaps.

There's a rustling as Becker hands the phone away and then Connor's voice comes over the line. "James? It's Connor. I tried to call you from my mobile, but the battery's died again."

"How do you even know where my office _is?_ " Lester asks. 

"Ruth wrote down the address on the emergency contact list for me," Connor says easily, as if the location for top secret installations like the ARC are handed out to anyone with a passing interest or access to the London A to Z. 

_Of course she did,_ Lester thinks. His wife and Connor have a camaraderie that makes no earthly sense whatsoever considering they are two of the most opposite people Lester has ever met. If he'd known the unholy alliance they would create, he'd never have taken Connor out of the squalid flat he'd found him in and offered him the post of live-in nanny of the Lester household based on the fact that he was the only applicant Sam and Anna condescended not to kick, bite, or otherwise maim.

However, as it turned out, Lester had given Connor the job, and Ruth had taken one look at Connor's admittedly endearing smile and made Lester pull up the square of yellow-black caution tape surrounding what was to be Connor's allotted living space and installed him in the guestroom instead. The rest is, as they say, history.

Lester rubs at the beginnings of the tension headache that has suddenly appeared behind his forehead. "What is your urgent message, Connor?" he asks, not particularly concerned. Connor's definition of urgent is it being six o’clock on Saturday night and the telly not tuned to the proper channel for Doctor Who.

"If you aren't at Anna's dance recital tonight, she's fully prepared to disown you," Connor says. Lester can hear Becker choke off a laugh in the background.

"She can't disown me," Lester says. "I'm the older relative and any disowning that goes on has to come from the top down."

"I would not take that chance, mate," Connor says. "She's a lead and everything. You'd better leave whatever you're doing for tomorrow and come out here. It starts in twenty minutes, but don't worry, I know a shortcut."

"Wait," Lester says, a horrible feeling creeping up on him like one of those hideous future predators. "You don't have a car. What are you driving?" Lester thinks of his new black Jag: 385 horsepower, heated leather seats, £40,000 price tag. Surely, _surely_ it's still tucked safely beneath its protective blanket in the garage. Surely, Connor is not--

"I'm in the Jag," Connor says, dashing Lester's hopes. "I know you said not to touch it on pain of death and dismemberment by a partially-trained mastodon, but this is important."

"Connor," Lester says, "If you are not out of the Jag by the time I get outside, there will be _serious consequences._ " He slams down the receiver, grabs his briefcase and almost gets shot by the trigger-happy redundant indoor security team Becker set up as he sprints toward the doors, holding up his ID pass perfunctorily. 

When Lester emerges from the ARC, Connor is still at the wheel of his Jag. The window is rolled down and Becker is leaning in, forearms resting on the doorframe. 

"Connor, out!" Lester shouts. 

Becker barely avoids knocking himself unconscious on the door as Connor jumps out and makes to head around to the passenger side. Becker stops him with a hand on the chest before he can get there and says something that Lester can't quite hear but which has Connor nodding like a bobble head doll.

Lester considers speeding away and leaving Connor in the lot, but Becker is looking at Connor with a strange intensity, the kind of look he usually reserves for the shiniest guns in the armory. It's somewhat unsettling.

"Good _bye,_ Captain," Lester bites out when Connor is finally seated in the car. He peels out so fast that Connor's loosely fastened safety belt snaps tight across his chest, knocking the air out of him.

"James," Connor says when he has his breath back and they've pulled out onto the A302, "do you think I could get Friday as my night off next week instead of Saturday?"

"Why?" Lester asks suspiciously.

Connor smiles and scrubs at the back of his head a little sheepishly. "Becker asked me out for a drink."

Lester almost runs the Jag into a light pole.

\--

Lester doesn't even have to invent reasons to keep Becker in the ARC and away from his dates with Connor. There's an Agathaumas and then a Kentrosaurus and then an entire pack of Coelurus that do it for him.

By the third cancelled date, Connor has begun to mope around the flat and do a good deal of abortive cookie making where he sets the oven to preheat and ends up eating all the dough before it finishes. 

Becker is starting to get an itchy trigger finger. He looks ready to spray bullets indiscriminately at whatever comes through the anomaly. Lester thinks it's probably for the best that Abby can shuttle between _I will kick your ass_ and _please don't_ expressions with such frightening skill.

\--

The anomaly detector blares annoyingly at precisely 6:00 pm, knocking off time. Ruth will be in the slow, infuriating morass of rush hour traffic. Connor will have dragged Sam and Anna home from football and lacrosse practices in a whirl of muddy cleats and started making something completely inedible on the stovetop. "Coordinates?" Lester asks the operator absently, snapping his briefcase closed and noting that Becker, Abby and Danny have appeared on the periphery to peer at the viewscreens as the detector zeroes in on a location, their feet planted like runners waiting for the signal gun. 

"Chaucer Street, in Southwark," the operator says. "It's a residential neighborhood." 

"It's _my_ residential neighborhood," Lester says, feet flying after Danny and the others, who started sprinting for the doors as soon as the address was read off. Lester shoves in beside Abby in the backseat of the SUV Danny is driving, Becker riding shotgun. "Go!" he shouts.

Danny guns it.

Lester should to be jammed against the door, crammed into an auto with five other people, but he's quite comfortable in the backseat with only Abby for company. Jenny is still on light duties, recovering from her temporary death experience of being frozen to near cryogenic levels to escape a mutant fungus. Cutter, on the other hand, ought to be here. "Where's Cutter?" Lester snaps.

No one says anything, which is code for _in his lab brooding over the artifact his psychotic wife almost killed him for._

"We'll be all right without him, sir," Becker says. "There's a security team behind us as backup."

No security team in the world is backup enough when Lester's children are in danger. He's calling in air support as they pull up in front of the house, tires screeching. There’s something lumbering away further down the street—Becker waves three of his men after it—but because this is Lester’s life, the actual anomaly seems to be smack in the middle of his home. 

The door is hanging awkwardly, missing a hinge at the bottom, and chunks of drywall have been gouged out of the narrow entrance hallway at knee height. When he bursts into the living room, inches behind Becker and another of his team, their guns leveled and tracking, Lester half expects to see Sam, Anna and Connor on the floor, blood flowing quickly out of fatal wounds. 

Instead, they're playing Rock Band. 

Anna is on guitar and Sam is pounding the drums. "Pedal, Sam, use the pedal!" Connor says from where he's sitting on the couch singing along to 'Wanted Dead or Alive' with a microphone in one hand. The anomaly is shining across the room, closed into a strange ball shape instead of flowing about like a shattered mirror.

"What," Lester says, "What--"

"James!" Connor says, "I thought you'd be here soon." He blushes in Becker's direction. "Hi, Becker," Connor says, shyly. Becker smiles at him tensely, gun still aimed carefully at the anomaly.

"Dad!" Sam says, abandoning the drums to run toward Lester. "There's an Ankylosaurus in my bedroom!"

Anna tilts her guitar to activate star power. "I hit it over the head with a fry pan," she says, smugly.

"It was pretty cool," Sam says with grudging admiration for his sister. 

Lester turns to Connor, who he pays an exorbitant fee of £11 per hour to be a halfway responsible adult. "Explain."

“There’s an Anyklosaurus in Sam’s bedroom,” Connor says. “Anna hit it over the head with a fry pan.”

“Thank you, Connor,” Lester says sarcastically. “I really didn’t want any _new_ information.”

“I’m getting there,” Connor says, placating. “The anomaly opened about half an hour ago and two Ankylosauri came straight out. No one screamed,” Connor adds, looking over at Sam and Anna who nod bravely. Lester suspects they all screamed like banshees but have made a solemn blood pact to never reveal it. “We got the door open and the first one ran outside. Anna sacrificed our pancakes and knocked out the second with the fry pan. Then something else started coming through. Might have been a Deinonychus or a Troodon. Anyway, sharp teeth, not something that should be around the kids, so I jabbed at it with the floor lamp."

"Yes, I see," Lester says, eyeing the large rips in the lampshade and the 90-degree angle at which the pole is now bent. 

"Yeah, sorry," Connor says, wincing. "But it basically electrocuted the Deinonychus, or the Troodon, and the anomaly shut up into a ball. I think it's locked." He prods at it with the remains of the floor lamp and instead of going through, the lamp bounces off.

"The professor is going to love this," Danny says, poking at the anomaly bare-handed, as if he doesn't even remember the time he curiously reached shoulder-deep into the Ordovician period and his arm returned to London covered in prehistoric leeches.

"You're all taking the reappearance of long extinct creatures, and their subsequent appearance in the house, suspiciously well," Lester says, looking at Sam, Anna and Connor with mistrust. Anna gives him her widest innocent eyes. Sam scuffs his shoe against the floor.

"About that," Connor says, not meeting Lester's gaze, "We _may_ have already known it was possible."

"How could you possibly know that?" Lester asks, aware that he's probably not going to like the answer. Connor has been using the proper terminology for the anomalies, he realizes.

"Well, see," Connor says, "we wanted to do paints, but there wasn't a scrap of spare paper to be found in the house. And we thought, maybe you'd have some in your office that you wouldn't begrudge us. Anna found a folder full of paper on your desk that looked promising, only it was already full up with writing." Connor gives Lester a beseeching look, his dark eyes huge.

"And that writing was about the anomalies and what came through them," Lester finishes for him. "I see." His office is tacitly off limits, but he should have known better than to bring home classified documents and not at least lock them in a drawer regardless. This is going to cause problems.

"Does it count as treason if it was an accident?" Connor asks. 

\--

"I don't see why I have to sign this," Connor says when he's sat down in the ARC in front of a copy of the Official Secrets Act, a pen shoved into his hand. "I've been keeping it secret perfectly fine for months without having scribbled my name on a stack of paper six inches deep. Think of the trees we'd be saving if you just kept this copy for the next person!"

"Connor, sign it," Lester growls. He had to call in a favor from Christine Johnson, the militant she-dragon herself, to get Connor out of an interrogation room in the basement of the Home Office and into the ARC and he just knows that's going to come back to bite him in the arse.

"All right, mate, steady on," Connor says, giving Lester a concerned look before flipping through to where bright yellow sticker tags indicate signatures are needed. "Just so you know, I made sure Sam and Anna wouldn't let it slip either when we found out _by accident,_ " he emphasizes. "I told them if they said a word about it to absolutely anyone, I would never make lemon bars again."

Jenny stares at him. "I know, bit harsh," Connor says, misinterpreting her look. "Lemon bars really only ever ought to be used as incentives, but I had to be firm. I understand how important your work here is."

"Sadly," Lester tells Jenny, "That is probably the most effective threat he could make in my household." Although, Lester will admit it’s not entirely empty. Connor’s lemon bars are delicious.

Connor signs and signs and signs until an hour has passed and Jenny’s iron will cracks due to his sad eyes and exaggerated babying of his wrist and she allows him a half hour break to visit the menagerie with Abby. Lester rolls his eyes.

“What?” Jenny says, defensive.

“Nothing,” Lester says. He’d once woken up at 1am to find Connor despondently studying for exams at the kitchen table, dark shadows already forming under his eyes, and driven fifteen miles to the nearest open supermarket that carried chocolate chip ice cream and Red Bull so he has no room to judge.

Connor comes back over an hour later, eyes shining, and barely even looks at the rest of the documents Jenny keeps slipping under his pen while he talks about the two Diictodons Abby showed him, obviously angling to get Lester to agree to take them home as pets.

“No,” Lester is saying for the thirtieth time as he leads Connor out of holding. He’ll have to call a car to get him home.

Connor stops dead on the main floor. "Professor Cutter!" he says, staring at Cutter as if he's the Second Coming. "I didn't know you worked with James."

"Sorry, do I know you?" Cutter asks, looking up from where he’s been poking at the artifact with the latest in a line of ridiculous archeological tools that are breaking Lester’s budget. He squints at Connor. "You do look a bit familiar, but I can't think where from."

"I'm in your Evolutionary Zoology course at CMU," Connor says. "I've been trying to get in contact with you for ages. I finished my dissertation."

" _Cutter_ is your dissertation dodging advisor?" Lester says. He looks at Cutter disapprovingly. "I don't know why I'm surprised." 

Cutter opens his mouth to argue, but Connor stalls him with a laugh. "Do you know what we call your Thursday 8pm seminars, Professor?" Connor asks, aiming a ridiculous grin at Cutter before answering his own question, "Pub night. We all gave up on you showing for them halfway through term." Cutter flushes. Connor doesn't seem to notice. "I can understand how this is much more exciting than classwork though," he says, reaching for a prototype one of the research scientists is working on.

"Don't touch that!" Lester yells, but Connor's already got his fingers twisting a mass of wires. He pulls a metal piece out of the innards of the machine and presses the red 'on' button. The machine shoots out a beam of clear white light where Lester has previously only seen it sputter, the scientist working on it swearing in three different languages.

"You're studying Evolutionary Zoology?" Cutter says, looking a little skeptical. "Not Applied Sciences or Engineering?"

"Well, I did a bit in Engineering," Connor admits. "And Computer Science. Chemistry. But, yes, I'm going through with Zoology. Can't compete with dinosaurs, you know."

Lester can almost literally see Cutter deciding to be Connor's mentor. It's going to be terrible. "Becker!" he calls. "Escort Connor out of the ARC."

"Gladly, sir," Becker says, smiling at Connor who beams back at him. Lester resigns himself to the fact that Connor is going to have disastrously close relationships with everyone on the team. Becker is clearly smitten. To all indications, Abby and Connor somehow became bosom friends during the tour Abby gave him of the menagerie, and Jenny decided about halfway through Connor's debrief that what he needed in life was a big sister figure. Lester has little doubt that Danny will be taking Connor out to the pub and sending him home staggeringly drunk soon.

"Professor," Connor calls as Becker drags him away, rather gentler and with more arm around the waist than Lester is strictly approving of, "If I sent you a copy of my dissertation in with James tomorrow, would you mark it? Only I'd like to show my gran my diploma and she's getting on in years." 

Lester has found that the complete lack of accusation in even the most damning things that come out of Connor's mouth makes them sting all the worse. He can tell Cutter for once shares a kindred feeling with him by the downturn of his mouth before he yells back, "Yes, Connor, send it to me."

\--

"He's brilliant," Cutter says, throwing the copy of Connor's dissertation that Lester had brought in that morning, as promised, down on Lester’s desk. "If he replaced every instance of alien spacecraft with anomaly, this would be a clear and concise explanation of the dissonance inherent in the fossil record. Not to mention his discovery of how to lock anomalies. I want him on the team."

"He already has a day job," Lester says, his attention still mostly focused on the 100B-22: Civilian Encounter with Ankylosaurus form he's filling out in triplicate.

Cutter throws his hands up in frustration. "As your nanny!" he shouts. "He could be saving lives! He could be helping me discover the secrets of the anomalies!"

"You think that's somehow more important than his making cheese toasties cut into triangles for my children?" Lester asks. Cutter looks about to explode and Lester would let him do it if he weren't in the sanctity of Lester's office. "Oh, relax, man," Lester says, chiding. "I've already asked him and he'd very much like to transition from corralling children to corralling dinosaurs. And he's conscripted one of his strange little friends to take on Sam and Anna, so all's well that ends well." 

Although, Lester has met Connor's friend Duncan, during a Battlestar Galactica themed birthday party Ruth and the children insisted on throwing for Connor's 23rd, and he's quite sure Sam and Anna will eat Duncan alive. It will be like two future predators versus a three-legged brontosaurus. 

It’s already been decided that Connor will stay on for evenings and weekends since he and Duncan took the kids to the zoo and Ruth said Duncan returned looking like he’d run the London Marathon while Connor proclaimed that Sam and Anna had been perfect angels.

“He starts next week,” Lester tells Cutter. “Give him some of your cast off chisels and whatnot. I’m not paying for new ones.”

\--

Connor joins the team on a cloudy Monday morning.

He starts off a bit jittery but within ten minutes he’s been assimilated into the insanity like he’s always been there and by the time the latest anomaly alert goes off, he’s kitted up and ready to go. Lester looks at him in his ridiculous fedora and scarf, computer tucked under one arm, and thinks, _my God, how did I let this happen?_

Some idiot has given Connor a tranq gun so Lester assumes at least one member of the team will be sleeping off the effects in the infirmary relatively soon. Any experience Connor has with guns is from first-person shooter games and laser tag.

"If you let him get eaten by a creature, I'm cutting your salary in half," Lester tells Becker and Danny as they're waiting for Connor to pack up his new anomaly locking machine prototype.

"Come on, guv. The salary's already a joke," Danny complains.

Becker clears his throat. "We'll make sure Connor is returned unharmed, sir," he says.

" _That_ is the correct answer," Lester says, sending a sneer in Danny's direction. “And go get him some Kevlar. Right now.”

\--

Connor survives a Triceratops and an Edmontosaurus and some kind of overlarge, mutated swordfish before he and Becker finally find time for an actual date. Lester is not waiting up on the couch. He’s genuinely watching the Arsenals and letting Ruth take the burden of pacing the hallway and waiting for the car to pull up.

Lester glances at the clock. If Becker doesn’t have Connor home by eleven, he might be convinced to turn on the GPS tracking in the SUV Becker checked out.

“Shh, turn it down!” Ruth says suddenly, completely unconcerned with the fact that rabid cheering is justly deserved, Arsenal having just scored against Tottenham. She’s at the front window, fingers pinching open the blinds. “Becker’s dropping Connor off and I need to concentrate to read their lips.”

“Dear God, woman,” Lester says, rolling his eyes, but he mutes the telly and quicksteps to the window. Apparently just in time for lip-reading to no longer be an issue. Practically Connor’s entire face is crushed against Becker’s.

Ruth sighs. “Tell me he’s worthy,” she demands. 

“Well, he’s a very good shot,” Lester admits.

Ruth glares at him.

“I don’t know!” Lester says. “We have a professional working relationship where I point and he shoots. In his personal life, he could be an Spurs fan for all I know.”

It’s the truth, Lester realizes as Connor practically floats through the door, his ridiculous smile almost cracking his face in half. There’s the slimmest of chances that this might work out.

There are also approximately one thousand and one ways things can end badly, the result ranging from chilly silence in the break room to someone getting shoved into the Cretaceous Period depending on how acrimonious the breakup is.

 _I need to put a stop to this,_ Lester thinks.

\--

DO NOT  
Sleep with: Captain Becker

Ruth rolls her eyes and tells him it's not as effective a deterrent as he apparently believes, but Lester doesn't think it's an unfair sign to leave above Connor's bed, and he's certainly not being discriminating. Sam has had a 

DO NOT  
Eat: Paste

reminder sign above the craft table since before he could read and Anna's room sports a

DO NOT  
Bite: Anyone!

Although, Poison Control knew them by name for most of the 90s and Anna's dental records can be seen on full display on two year four boys, a DI and Santa Claus, so Ruth may have a point.

\--

Lester came down to the staff commissary because he wanted a cup of tea, _not_ because he wanted to see Connor sitting on the countertop, Becker shoved up against his lips. They're blocking the cabinet where Lester hides his Darjeeling.

"Ahem," Lester says.

Connor's head thuds back against the cabinet. Becker fits his hand behind Connor's skull retroactively.

"Did you not see the sign I made for you?" Lester asks. "Was the capitalization of _do not_ somehow unclear?"

"I thought you just meant in my room," Connor says. His lips are swollen and his fist is still clenched around a handful of Becker's black t-shirt. 

"Connor," Lester says, snapping his fingers toward the door. Connor slinks out of the room with an apologetic look back at Becker. Once he's safely out of hearing range, Lester turns to Becker.

"I realize," Lester says, "that you are the one of us with more ready access to firearms, but don't think I won't do something worse than shoot you in the kneecaps if you break Connor's heart."

"Yes, sir," Becker says. 

Becker was remanded to the team under the shadow of something more weighty than disapproval, but less official than a black mark and made it all the way into the ARC without being pulled aside and made to understand that, in all sincerity, he’d probably be mauled by a dinosaur within his first week at his new post. It doesn’t suggest that he’s well loved by the Army.

Lester on the other hand, as the man that has yet to completely fuck up the fact that prehistoric creatures are now routinely invading the UK, has political capital to burn. 

“If at any point he stops looking ridiculously happy, I’ll have you redeployed to the Yukon,” Lester says. Most people would probably consider a transfer out of the ARC a joyous reprieve, but Becker, like the rest of the civilian team, seems to take a perverse sort of pleasure in almost being eaten by something prehistoric at least once every other month.

“Yes, sir,” Becker says, back straight.

“All right,” Lester sighs, waving Becker out the door and grabbing a mug with the ARC insignia off the drainer. “Go have your cuddle somewhere people _aren’t_ trying to make a cuppa.”

-

When the claxons ring out, everyone is, serendipitously, in the armory, helping Becker sort through all the new toys the PM sent over after Lester had casually told a few amusing work anecdotes during their last weekly squash game.

Connor’s installed screens in practically every room of the ARC, so everyone in the building can enjoy the horror of knowing exactly where creatures that can swallow deer whole or spit acid or crush tractor trailers are currently doing a walkabout in modern London. Abby tilts the one over her shoulder so Cutter can see the anomaly coordinates. 

“That’s the British Museum,” Cutter says. Jenny glances over and nods, slotting a cartridge into her elephant gun.

Danny hefts a modified tranquilizer bazooka over his shoulder.

“Very nice,” Becker says, running an admiring hand over it as he straps an extra ammo belt across his chest. 

“I know, right?” Danny grins.

Lester rolls his eyes and looks to Connor. For once, he has his gun safely holstered rather than pointed loosely and obliquely at the ground, and he’s pulling the bulky, reinforced steel briefcase that holds the anomaly locking mechanism off its shelf. 

They all look so close to competent that Lester might cry.

“Well then,” Lester says, clearing his throat. “Get on with it.”


End file.
